Memory
The one really in charge
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Memory is a fickle thing. A photo of a place that you have seared into your memory shows up in physical form right in front of you when you least expect it. The kicker is, you look nothing like you remembered. “Was I ever as old as I thought I was?” We create these maps, these liquid circuit boards in our head, urging electricity to run through and give us a memory to hold onto. I have a very spatial mind. When it comes to directions I see a three-dimensional, top-down sometimes, map of where I need to go. Maybe not as useful as a photographic memory or something, but I rarely get lost, even on vacation. My dreams are very vivid, and I rarely sleep without them. I feel as though my memories are too. Yet, the vividness and the detail of my memories does not mean they will be accurate. No lol, we all suffer this same fate. No matter if you dream every night or rarely. Memories are the same
Last weekend I was at a joint family grad party. My little cousin Will was graduating from High School, and his brother David was graduating from Grad School. And as one does for a grad party, my Aunt Kitty made photo boards with old 5x7 film print outs. As I was crowded around the boards with the rest of my family pointing out details we remembered and reminiscing I noticed a photo of my cousin Kyle, my Mom, my grampa and I that felt like it jumped on my chest.
This photo scared the shit out of me. On Wednesday of last week, I was telling my wife Casey about how for birthday parties my extended family would all meet at the original Buddy’s Pizza, how I can picture the table we sat at, how I remember everything about it back then, and how different it is now. Four short days later I’m staring at this photo like I’m in a goofy version of The Ring (2002). To have my memory laid out right in front of me in such a way was jarring. Like the universe was saying to me “you mean like this?” Often times when I return to a place of memory whether physically or in a photograph or video things looks smaller. But in this case it was us that looked smaller. Buddy’s still looks that way, barring Irv and his glasses, and that huge gumball machine. I don’t remember ever being that young at Buddy’s, Kyle was born in Oklahoma, and lived there for a good portion of his childhood, so was he visiting for Christmas? I have so many questions about one photograph. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said “It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.” Well said Francis.
There are of course memories that earnestly scare me. There are times when my sister Erin, or my mom will callback to a dark event in our family’s past that I bewilderingly say I somehow forgot. My memory protects me more than I give it credit. The way it blacks out memories that will only hurt me may be for the best. I don’t know a lot about memory repression, and don’t pretend to, psychology is a lot, and it’s a lot that I never studied. What little I do know is a repressed memory occurs when trauma is too severe to be kept in conscious memory, and is removed by repression or dissociation or both. At some later time, it may be recalled, often under innocuous circumstances, and reappear in conscious memory. Is our memory shortcircuiting over something traumatic? Are electrons not firing over some kind of blocker in the brain, just too much? The interesting part about all of this is, that memory researchers argue that there is no substantial scientific evidence that repressed memories exist, whereas clinicians claim the opposite – this debate has been referred to as the “memory wars” by scholars in the field. Anyone who has “re-remembered” a very traumatic detail of their life will tell you yes, repressed memories do exist. Debates like this are incredibly fascinating to someone like me, and I’m happy that I don’t have to weigh in on them as a professional. My favorite author is Maggie Nelson, and her little tangent on memory from her seminal work Bluets was something kicking around my old head made for this piece.
“For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.”
―Maggie Nelson, Bluets
The more I sit and ponder memory I think of memories I probably made up. I remember believing I watched our American Pitbull Buddy (coincidental name not named after the aforementioned Detroit-style pizza mecca) chase a man dressed as the Easter Bunny onto and over a wooden fence as a kid. There’s no way that happened. I was very young, and most likely made that up before carrying that in my heart as a myth for my life, and my journey. I could list off half a dozen “memories” I’ve carried around and cherished that were mine alone, not examples of The Mandela Effect, but just as improbable. If you’ve made it this far I have a little homework for you. I urge you to think about memories you have, the inconsequential little ones, especially memories that no one else shares with you. Write them down on a piece of scratch paper, or type them out in the notes app, and really ponder these little vignettes of your life. Your own personal lore. Who knows, maybe you dreamt them and told yourself they really happened, maybe they did, really happen I’m not the judge of that, you are.
Be good to one another—
you have no idea how much time you have left,
Sean
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